We’ve been hard at work integrating our email marketing software with WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and now vBulletin.

You can now integrate subscriptions to your newsletters during the vBulletin registration process, so as to not force the user to submit multiple forms. The newsletter subscription will be submitted as soon as the user finishes registering for vBulletin access.

To include this on your own vBulletin registration form, download our vBulletin plugin and import it as a new product in the vBulletin admin section.

Setting this up involves three quick steps:

1. Create new user profile fields for “Yes/No” radio options, and (optional) “Name” textbox.
2. Import the XML file to the Manage Products page in vBulletin admin section.
3. Fill in your ActiveCampaign Email Marketing details on the vBulletin Options/Settings page.

vBulletin users can also manage their subscription(s) to your mailing list(s) directly from their forum account.

For more information, additional screenshots, and instructions, visit our email marketing vBulletin integration page.

Subscription Forms are excellent ways to promote your newsletter on any website, even Facebook and WordPress sites.

It’s often tiresome to have to manually update every webpage that you have embedded subscription form HTML on, when any changes are made to the form.

A unique idea might be to use our email marketing API to display a subscription form. This tutorial will briefly walk through how to use PHP and our API to display subscription forms. Then, when changes are made to the subscription form, you no longer have to update every instance of the form across the web!

Note: Please be aware that doing this will cause repeated requests to the external domain, which can slow down sites, especially those with high traffic. This example, more or less, introduces how simple it is to use the API.

Obtaining your subscription form ID

First, visit your Subscription Form page in the admin section, and choose which form you want to display on an external website. Click the “View” link next to the subscription form name. Then note the unique number at the end of the URL (in this case, 1001):

This is the ID of the subscription form. We’ll use this in our API call.

PHP

In PHP, set up your script to make an API call using the form_view action:

// Base API path
$path = "http://mysite.com/admin/api.php?";

// Initialize curl request
$request = curl_init($path . "api_user=admin&api_pass=test&api_action=form_view&api_output=serialize&id=1001&generate=1");

// Set other curl details
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

// Get the response
$response = (string)curl_exec($request);

// Close curl
curl_close($request);

// Set final result array to variable
$result = unserialize($response);

This will go out and obtain the information for form ID 1001, and set it to an array which we can reference easily.

HTML

Now you just need to write out the HTML for your subscription form:

echo $result["html"];

That’s it! The entire HTML structure of the form can be obtained through a simple API call.

Improvements

If you have a few forms you want displayed on various spots around the web, it might be wise to write a function for yourself, so you don’t have to repeat the curl code for each form you display:

function ac_api_form_view_html($id)
{
	$path = "http://mysite.com/admin/api.php?";

	$request = curl_init($path . "api_user=admin&api_pass=test&api_action=form_view&api_output=serialize&id=" . $id . "&generate=1");

	curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
	curl_setopt($request, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	$response = (string)curl_exec($request);
	curl_close($request);
	$result = unserialize($response);

	if ($result["response_code"])
	{
		return $result["html"];
	}
}

Here’s how you’d call this function:

$form_html = ac_api_form_view_html(1001);

echo $form_html;

Two lines is not bad!

Going further

As mentioned at the beginning, using the API in this manner might result in slower site performance, since your script has to re-request the data each time the page is loaded. It might be wise to cache the subscription form HTML locally, then only re-fetch the updated data at a set interval, such as weekly.

Our Wordpress plugin performs the same type of caching, if desired.

Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions for the API.

Our email marketing software lets you embed subscription forms on other sites by simply copying and pasting HTML code.

To make things even easier, we’ve created a WordPress plugin that lets you display any subscription form on your WordPress site, with just a few clicks.

All of this happens without any copying and pasting. Simply supply your email marketing software URL, and login information, and choose what form you’d like displayed.

The form will then appear in the sidebar of your WordPress site:

It’s that simple!

You can even opt to request the updated form each time the page is loaded, so any changes you make to the form in your email marketing software will always be reflected!

Learn more about this plugin, and let us know if you have questions or suggestions!